City of Seattle officials said downtown is in better shape than it was a year ago but there is much more work to do — including but not limited to bringing more workers back to downtown offices.
Representatives from the Mayor’s Office, the Office of Economic Development, and the Office of the Waterfront and Civic Projects gathered at City Hall Wednesday for a media roundtable to recap the first year of Mayor Bruce Harrell’s Downtown Activation Plan to revitalize the city core post-pandemic.
“Downtown is going through a major metamorphosis, and it’s certainly not easy and it’s not always linear,” said Markham McIntyre, director of Seattle’s Office of Economic Development.
The mayor’s plan is organized around seven goals for downtown, including making the area safer, a more affordable place to live, a thriving retail sector, a place where people want to work, a place for arts, sports, culture and entertainment, a destination for visitors, and a healthier and greener part of the city.
Markham said the entire plan hinges on the thesis that “downtown runs on people” and each goal is designed to attract more people — not just the office workers who left more than four years ago when Covid-19 struck.
“We can’t just rely on workers coming back downtown and assume that’s going to solve all of our downtown issues,” McIntyre said. “Certainly workers are a part of the solution, that’s why we’ve made that one of our goals. But we can’t fixate on just one thing. We have to have an open mindset and have multiple channels of action.”
Those channels of action include everything from increased crime fighting, new uses for empty storefronts, beautification and mural projects, and more.
Last May, Amazon instituted a mandate for a minimum of three days per week in office for its more than 50,000 corporate and tech employees in Seattle. Just over a year later, the South Lake Union neighborhood around the tech giant’s headquarters buildings is buzzing with renewed activity.
Mayor Harrell has previously praised Amazon’s policy, and earlier this month called for the city’s executive branch employees to increase in-office work from two days to three. Supporting the Downtown Activation Plan was not the primary reason for the new mandate, although it was a factor.
Deputy Mayor Tim Burgess stressed during Wednesday’s meeting that approximately 65% of the city’s 13,000 employees have already been reporting to their workstations every day since before the pandemic began, through the pandemic and continuing today. He said Harrell went to three days because he believes — as did Amazon CEO Andy Jassy — that having teams together is a positive thing.
“It’s not just about ‘let’s bring our workers back so we can revitalize downtown,’ although that’s certainly a factor, but it’s ‘we will work better together, we will be more productive, we will be more creative if we’re together and engaging with each other,'” Burgess said. “That’s what you’ve heard from Amazon. That’s what you’ve heard from other companies.”
King County and Sound Transit also announced plans to adjust in-person policies and Burgess called Harrell’s ability to “persuade them to come along with us” a huge positive for downtown and those workers.
The Downtown Seattle Association reported in its latest Downtown Revitalization Dashboard that in July, downtown averaged more than 90,000 workers per weekday — the second-highest figure since March 2020. It’s a 14% increase from July 2023 and 62% of the daily worker foot traffic seen in July 2019.
Even if some workers are coming back, many are still in remote and hybrid work styles that have helped fuel Seattle’s high office vacancy rates. While the city ponders the difficult and costly task of potentially converting some unused office space into housing, McIntyre said they’re working with large tech companies, other employers, property owners and developers on additional creative strategies.
“What are the levers that the city can pull to continue to make those spaces attractive and active?” he said, adding that in cooperation with the Mayor’s Office, the Office of Economic Development is working on an “attraction strategy” to take to the San Francisco Bay Area later this year. There, they’ll talk to companies that are looking at opening satellite offices in Seattle.
“The reality is that as there are depressed office values, that means there’s some great deals,” McIntyre said. “And so we are seeing companies start to see Seattle as undervalued, and want to come here and open up space.”
Meanwhile, as the city looks toward the completion of 15 years of construction along the Seattle waterfront next spring, as well as the arrival of 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup soccer tournament and an influx of visitors, it’s also promoting a desire to make over the southern end of downtown as a “bookend” to what has been created in South Lake Union.
While that end of the city wouldn’t have 50,000 Amazon employees to fill office buildings, Burgess did say the early planning process is a “huge opportunity for the city,” especially as it relates to residential development for an area that goes from Columbia Street on the north to Holgate Street on the south, and from Interstate 5 to Elliott Bay.
“We don’t know the answers to everything yet,” Burgess said. “But I think what South Lake Union has shown us, and what the waterfront has shown us, is we can do these big things that require a lot of cooperation with a lot of different stakeholders.”
